This is a story with a lot of twists,” says S. Jayakrishnan, circle inspector of police, Kalamassery, Kerala. Instantly, one leans a little forward, interest piqued. It conjures images of some sort of a suspense novel, perhaps with an unexpected climax. For a moment, it is easy to forget that we are dealing with real lives here and each ‘twist’ is a source of fresh pain. This is the story of Mumtaz and her cousin Iqbal. Mumtaz’s mother is mentally ill and her father had left her when she was very young. Last year, Mumtaz, then 17, complained of stomach ache. She was taken to a local hospital where she gave birth to a child. Later, she revealed that her cousin Iqbal, then 12, had raped her.
“A DNA test confirmed Iqbal’s paternity,” says Jayakrishnan. “A case was filed under POCSO [Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act]. Now, here’s where the twist comes. According to the statement of the boy, who has the mental age of a 10-year-old, the girl had lured him into having sexual relations with her. So, the victim became the perpetrator and the perpetrator became the victim.”
It is difficult to ascertain the truth of what happened. But perhaps, the truth is that both Mumtaz and Iqbal are victims—victims of a system in which the free availability of pornography and a host of other factors mean that children mature sexually at a young age. “I have been hounded by the media ever since this happened,” says Mumtaz, when I go to meet her. “I don’t want my story to be told. I’ve already faced so much of harassment; they might drive me out of town if there is further publicity.” There is a surety in her voice, something fixed and unambiguous about it. Perhaps it is the voice of someone who is tired of recounting and defending her side of what happened. Or perhaps it is the voice of someone who has had to do a lot of growing up in a short time. Her trauma put an abrupt halt to her childhood. What might it do to her adulthood?
The figures are stark. According to a 2007 survey sponsored by the women and child development ministry, more than 53 per cent of children in India are subjected to sexual abuse. In Kerala itself, 2,122 cases were registered under POCSO in 2016, a sharp rise from the 77 cases that were registered in 2012. But these are just numbers. Numbers can’t communicate feelings, shatter lives or tell stories of confused pasts and conflicted futures. But women like Meenakshi can.
Meenakshi is a 30-year-old woman from Mumbai who was sexually abused as a child. “It happens so organically that you don’t know something bad has happened,” she says. “These perpetrators like to play games. They don’t attack upfront. So, when it happened to me, there was a lot of guilt and shame. Intellectually, you know that you didn’t do anything wrong but emotionally, you blame yourself. You think that you gave consent.”
Meenakshi used to be a lively and naughty child but after the sexual abuse, she became very silent. She also became violent. She used to get very angry, shout at people and scratch and bite the servants. Her parents thought she was just being naughty. She has this picture of herself at a birthday party where everyone else was having fun but she is sitting apart. “I was living behind a glass wall where you’re able to see everything but you can’t communicate and no one understands you,” she says.
Imaging: Deni Lal
Growing up, she suppressed memories of the abuse. “That’s the only way I could function,” she says. Her grades started dipping but she had stopped caring. Then, in her late teens, she watched the film Monsoon Wedding, in which there are scenes of sexual abuse. Something got triggered and the memories started coming back. She broke down and started crying violently. Later, her parents could see that she was depressed but they didn’t believe in therapy, which they thought was for mad people. After her father’s death in her 20s, Meenakshi started unravelling and she couldn’t bear it anymore. “I was 23 or 24,” she says. “I had started earning. I went online and found a therapist.” Slowly, through counselling, she started healing. “My therapist showed me that all my bad memories were kept in a dark room. It was like I had dissociated from them. I had to integrate those memories in my mind. I had to slowly open the box instead of running away.”
The truth is that you don’t realise how big a role the past has played in moulding you into the person you have become. Your behaviour is normalised to such an extent that you don’t realise that the normal is rooted in the abnormal. “It was not just psychological but there were physiological changes as well,” says Meenakshi. “I couldn’t bear physical touch from anybody. Whenever someone hugged me, I would stiffen up. It also affected my sexual relations with men. Physically, I would shut down at the slightest physical overture.” There seems to be scientific proof to back her claim. Child sexual abuse can alter brain chemistry, found one study, in which women who were abused as children had six times higher levels of ACTH, a hormone secreted in response to stress, than women who hadn’t been abused. They also had higher heart rates than non-abused women when exposed to mild stress in a laboratory setting.
“Sexual abuse can take the form of cryptic expressions in the child,” says Dr Deepak Raheja, senior psychiatrist and director of Hope Care Centre, Delhi. “Memories can get suppressed. Adulthood is an amalgamation of various experiences. But a dysfunctional childhood experience can certainly scar your existence as an adult.”
Those who have suffered sexual abuse as children are also more prone to depression and psychiatric disorders. But depression is a roomy term. Anyone can fall victim to it. I might be depressed if I lose my job. How do you verbalise the particular depression of a sex abuse victim? That paradoxical cocktail of fear and anger? A lifetime spent looking over your shoulder? “If someone had hit me, I could have told my parents what had happened,” says Meenakshi. “But when I was sexually abused, I just didn’t have the language to communicate that.”
Child sexual abuse is like a multi-headed beast, she says. When you slay one head, another head rears up. “I kept feeling new emotions. In my 20s, for example, I did not experience anxiety but now I do. You are never completely healed. Healing is a life-long process,” she says.
When I finished talking to Meenakshi, she asked me something. “Can you refer to me as a survivor and not as a victim? It is a more empowering term.” A survivor is someone who has survived a calamity. But someone who has suffered sexual abuse is so much more than a survivor. The writer Virginia Woolf, who was molested by her brothers well into her 20s, said something poignant about her experience. “It is so difficult to give any account of the person to whom things happen.” In a world that valorises people who do things, how do you really define a person to whom things are done? The word ‘survivor’ seems inadequate.
(The names of the survivors have been changed to protect their identity.)
